Lessons to be Learnt from Hip V Hype’s Playbook for its ParkLife 2 Project

Ten years ago, Hip V Hype founder Liam Wallis and partner in life and business Katya Crema made a bet that design quality and transparency would eventually become the most effective commercial tools a developer could use. In a market where many projects have stalled or been shelved and pre-sales pipelines have dried up, the pair’s latest project, ParkLife 2, suggests they were right. Builder Markscon is on site and construction is under way for the 60-apartment Brunswick project. That it’s nearly 70 per cent sold proves ParkLife 2 is a study in what it takes to get a project off the ground when many cannot. Brand-building a decade in the making “The single biggest reason is the years of work we’ve put into who we are, what we do, how we do it and how we communicate that to people,” Wallis tells The Urban Developer . “It also comes down to certainty. In uncertain times, if you can put forward something that speaks to what people are genuinely looking for, you can make that work.” Brand recognition was built project by project. Notable examples include Ferrars and York at South Melbourne—carbon-neutral in operation and fully electric, with an average NatHERS rating of 8.6 stars. ParkLife at Nightingale Village in Brunswick, also designed by Austin Maynard Architects, was nationally recognised for its climate-responsive approach. Wallis and Crema have lived in projects they have developed, and that lived experience informs how the business communicates with buyers. Site selection the second pillar The ParkLife 2 site at 427 Albert Street is between Clifton Park to the north and Gilpin Park to the south, so each apartment has a park outlook that cannot be built out. Delete In the lead up to the site purchase, Hip V Hype divested two earlier projects that received suboptimal planning outcomes and were ultimately unviable. The decision to commit to ParkLife 2 was framed around finding a project with enough inherent quality to trade through sustained difficulty. “In difficult times, quality projects will still be viable,” Wallis says. “That was the calculation.” Crema says the micro-location and park outlook was the clearest point of difference in the sales campaign. “Brunswick is a dense suburb and there’s so much to love about it. It has incredible amenity, public transport and retail but it does get pretty chaotic,” Crema says. “To walk 10 minutes away from that and nestle yourself between two parks, where you have access to that when you want it but feel secluded when you don’t—that’s what makes this project stand out. “Buyers having certainty that they will always be looking out onto a park is also a really big tick. At the end of the day, they’re buying homes. They’re not looking at this as a yield-driven investment.” The September 2025 sales launch was preceded by 12 months of events under the company’s Better Building Exchange series. That brought more than 2000 people through the site without a direct sales pitch. “We ran a series of design presentations to our database and really leveraged the brand that we’d built in Brunswick and beyond,” Crema says. ▲ Katya Crema, Victorian planning minister Sonya Kilkenny and Liam Wallis at the Parklife 2 construction commencement ceremony. Within the first month of those presentations, the project sold 10 apartments. It was enough to confirm market acceptance before construction commitments were finalised. “There’s a really nice mix of home buyers: people who are upsizing or upgrading their home, people who are downsizing and families with kids too,” Crema says. “There are six or seven young families in the building.” Purchasers are predominantly owner-occupiers from Melbourne’s inner north, with buyers also coming from the inner west and interstate drawn by Melbourne’s relative affordability. “We’re not selling at luxury price points, we’re not selling at affordable price points, we’re in a premium, middle space,” Wallis says. Cbus Property’s involvement as finance partner provided confidence to purchasers and for construction. Construction tenders were also run alongside the pre-sales campaign rather than sequentially, allowing the team to price accurately from launch and negotiate the construction contract in parallel with sales momentum. ▲ Hip V Hype used its Better Building Exchange series to build site awareness in the 12 months before ParkLife 2 went to market. Sustainability credentials reinforce proposition ParkLife 2 targets an average NatHERS rating of 8.5 stars, is fully electric and powered by 100 per cent renewable energy. Hip V Hype calculates that an 8.5-star apartment uses at least 40 per cent less energy than a standard 6-star apartment, a figure consistent with post-occupancy data the company gathered from Ferrars and York, where apartments consumed between 40 and 50 per cent less energy than minimum compliance. Crema says buyers engage with the sustainability case across a range of motivations, whether driven by health and air quality, energy costs or a preference for lower-impact living. Delete HV.Hotel South Melbourne ( pictured above ), atop the Ferrars and York building, operates as a living laboratory. It’s a bookable, carbon-neutral certified apartment rated at 8.1 stars NatHERS where more than 500 people have experienced sustainable living firsthand. “You can’t really understand it until you’ve experienced it,” Wallis says. “That’s a really big part of our broader mission, to educate the market as to what better looks and feels like.” A second hotel, HV.Hotel Brunswick, is planned within ParkLife 2 and expected to open in 2027. The influence of planning reforms While planning reforms play a role, Wallis is direct about its limits. ParkLife 2 was accepted into the Victorian Government’s Development Facilitation Program (DFP). Without the DFP and reforms Wallis says the project would not exist. “The planning reforms … have been instrumental in creating settings that enable development to move forward,” he says, but adds that “downstream friction remains”. The interface between administration-issued permits and council’s retained referral authority continues to slow delivery, and Victoria’s tax settings continue to suppress at-risk equity, compressing margins and deterring investment, Wallis says. Learning and sharing development lessons The deeper lesson Wallis wants to put to the market is that the intellectual property underpinning Hip V Hype’s approach is not proprietary. The company’s in-house sustainability and building services consultancy currently has close to 7000 apartments across Australia on its books and works with private, institutional and government developers. ▲ Hip V Hype’s Better Business team works with businesses so they can understand, craft and implement ESG strategies that become value drivers. “Our vision is to lead by example and show that doing better is not only possible, but that it’s worthwhile,” Wallis says. “If we can create exemplar projects that show design and sustainability as inherent to operational practice can underpin commercial success, then we see our cities improve over time.” Crema comes back to the bet they both made 10 years ago. “Buyers will always invest in places built to last and designed with genuine care,” she says. “That still seems to be trumping economic conditions.”

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